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On Oct 18, 2005, at 19:01, Michael Champion wrote:
> is it better to build a more fully conformant Efficient
> XML Interchange (the sanitized term for what we used to call "binary
> XML")
Just to nitpick, it's called EXI not to "sanitize" the scary "binary"
word away but because it should be (and is) open to alternatives.
Indeed, an EXI format is unlikely to be Human Readable (a more
precise choice of terms than binary, IMHO), but if it can be then
more power to it. Ideas for EXI formats should certainly never be
rejected on the grounds that they're not "binary", it would be quite
frankly stupid.
> Overall, my concern is that we as an industry neither look for magic
> fixes that solve all known efficiency problems (which arguably the
> W3C is about to futilely attempt to do)
Now now Mike, I know this is xml-dev so anything goes but I also know
that you know better because you've said so on member-only list ;)
You very well know that the W3C, through it's chartering of a WG to
work on EXI (which as you also know is not at this time decided), is
not trying to solve *all* known efficiency problems, not in the
world, not in computing, not in XML. The idea is to hit a sweet spot
that covers enough ground to be adopted by those who need a
specification in the XML family that's more efficient than what they
have now while impacting the XML ecosystem as little as is
conceivably possible.
There's disagreement on the sweet spot, with one side preferring a
proliferation of non-interoperable binary formats tailored to
specific usage scenarios (as many once thought was also appropriate
for office documents), and another thinking it's possible and should
be worth a shot. I am more than receptive to opinions indicating that
the second sweet spot may be hard to get to and that failure is
fraught with many perils, I do however have a really, really hard
time finding anything sweet about the spot you're defending.
Oh wait, are we on permathread territory here? :)
--
Robin Berjon
Senior Research Scientist
Expway, http://expway.com/
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